Writing about Debian is not a simple thing. You know it's the giant that has spawned pretty
much every other distro out there. It's almost like a Roman Empire, almost a taboo.
Furthermore, it's not a desktop distro per se. It's more sort of a template you use to build
your platform. It's also a SOHO server distro, therefore it more fits into the business
category, comparable to CentOS and similar.

However, I think in their dual quest to be both the purest and the most versatile distro they have reached a point where they are blind to that third necessity: Installable by a newbie.

Why is that a necessity? Is there a Linux desktop movement standards committee?

My opinion of Debian is that it is ran by some of the looniest GPL loons (iceweasel???) but they have never tried pushing a fake image on me. Like Slackware they aren't claiming to be ready for Grandma's desktop so I don't see why anyone would complain about their distro not being user friendly.

Maybe I've just done so many Slack installs over the years that I find it to be the easiest installation out there. I feel that Debian should live up to that standard.

I honestly have nothing against Debian in general, and in fact used it for both servers and workstations for many years without issue. It's this current release that I find extremely lacking compared to past releases.

My opinion of Debian is that it is ran by some of the looniest GPL loons (iceweasel???)

The Icedove, Iceweasel, Iceape naming scheme has *absolutely* NOTHING to do with the GPL.

Debian devs added patches to the Firefox, Thunderbird, etc code. They sent the patches to Mozilla. Mozilla decided not to add them to the source tree. Debian devs kept the patches to their sources, thus making their Firefox/Thunderbird/etc packages different from the binaries shipped by Mozilla. Since they are different, they are not allowed to use the Firefox/Thunderbird/etc names.